ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
Musa Moussaoui, Wade Marcum
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2091-2114
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2309601
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the most challenging nuclear power plant accidents, transient critical heat flux (CHF) is a primary phenomenon that drives peak cladding temperature, and ultimately, fuel failure. It has not yet been determined whether the use of steady-state CHF methods can accurately predict transient CHF under the conditions of a blowdown due to a loss-of-coolant accident.
There are limited comprehensive experiments at prototypic conditions. To address this deficiency, a quality separate-effects test facility was built to simulate an electrically heated rod under blowdown conditions. Testing reached full pressurized water reactor thermal-hydraulic conditions. With scaled break sizes as large as a double-end cold leg break, CHF was repeatedly measured with depressurization rates ranging from 7 to 17 MPa s−1.
These measurements at prototypic conditions acquired in a controlled methodology are novel to the body of knowledge. Several steady-state CHF methods and heater models were evaluated using RELAP5-3D simulations and the Dakota framework. The results showed that many steady-state CHF methods performed inadequately, but that recently developed wide-ranged, look-up table methods had the most acceptable results. Additionally, the results showed no significant correlation between prediction accuracy and the depressurization rates tested.